As per usual, blog posts these days are sporadic and nothing like when I began this little page on the internet and posted on a schedule. Back then, I was focusing almost solely on recovery and routine helped provide security for that process, so my life was fairly regimented.
Nowadays, nothing about my life is routine. Well, okay, that’s not entirely fair. My class schedule was routine and my work schedule was routine, but even those were less so than semesters past with one of my classes only meeting half the time and work constantly needing to be shifted to accommodate for me dealing with perpetual car troubles. Besides that, though, life has been full. Full of school work which I was often too burned out to care about (who even am I? Not caring about school? Yeah, that’s how burned out I am), full of new experiences, and full with new friends and a family I never expected to gain, and full of finitude.
One of my professors really loves to talk about finitude. He loves it so much that he is writing a book about it, in fact. So for the last four semesters in various classes I’ve had with him, this topic has come up a lot.
My own finitude stared me in the face more this semester than ever before. It seems as though I say that with each passing semester, but the subsequent one always seems to pose even greater challenges, asks me to grow and stretch even more, and reveals just a little more how deeply finite I am.
It’s not a feeling I enjoy, but the fact that I overslept, did not get up to study as I had planned, and was about to miss my 8 am final this morning had a friend not called and woken me up and I was fairly composed about the entire thing shows growth, or apathy, take your pick. The point is, though, that my sophomore year I overslept and missed a French test, not even a final, just a test, and I was in tears and a lot more mental anguish than I was today.
So while my final grades are going to be less than stellar this semester, while I am mourning the loss of academic achievements which were once my identity, and while I am scared of what one of my grades may mean for my future (looking at you, potential D in Organic Chemistry), I am also just happy to be done, happy that I survived, happy that I am one semester closer to completing my undergraduate degree and, hopefully, one step closer to medical school (but those fears and that journey are a post for another day).
So it’s been a hard one, and finitude sucks, but praise God we have a father to trust in who is infinite and who moves in my shortcomings and reveals his strength in my weakness.
With that being said, here are some photos from the semester. I didn’t take nearly as many as I have in the past and found myself leaving my camera behind more often than taking it along, but that’s just life sometimes, you know?
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